New 1.14 RC date?

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ben Finney wrote:
> Talden <talden at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> My understanding is that the discussion is about delaying the
>>> release of Bazaar 1.14 in order to get the new format into that
>>> release. It's that which I'm objecting to: I don't think a
>>> development format should be in a release at all, until it's no
>>> longer considered a development format.
>> Moving from one VCS to another is, for some, a very very long road.
>> If it's not trivial to preview an upcoming format then it's likely
>> Bazaar will not even be considered.
> 
> That's a pretty poor reason to put code not yet ready for release into
> a release. It argues, instead, for easier access to ‘bzr.dev’; but
> isn't that already pretty easy?
> 

I guess it breaks down that we have 5 stages of format development:

1) Twinkling in someone's eye
   This probably exists in someone's branch, but probably doesn't even
   think much about passing the full test suite.

2) alpha
   Generally available in a shared branch. This passes most tests. The
   basic structure is probably solidified, but at this point there is
   only a basic 'use once' guarantee. (you can convert to it, but we
   don't guarantee we won't change the disk format tomorrow.)

3) beta
   Stable disk format. Passes all tests. We guarantee that if you commit
   your data in this format, we will be able to get your data back out.
   We don't guarantee that this format has had all the rough edges
   smoothed out, or that the exact disk format will be supported for a
   long time in the future. (I believe our specific guarantee is
   something like 1 release past when it was available, though we've
   done more than that.)
   This is generally when it lands in bzr.dev, and is made available in
   the next release (as a clearly marked --development format).

4) final
   Stable disk format, for which we will provide read-write support for
   a long time, and read support for even longer. To give numbers here,
   we don't have *any* stable formats that we don't support reading
   from, and only 1 format that we don't support writing to.

   So it is hard to give an exact end-of-lifetime, given that we have
   never stopped supported reading from:
      "Bazaar-NG branch, format 0.0.4\n"

   According to NEWS, bzr-0.0.4 was released on 2005-04-22 (about one
   month after I started following the bzr mailing list.) And
   considering that 0.0.0.69 was the "first public release" back in
   2005-03-22, that pretty much means we read from everything we have
   ever released.

   We've talked about getting rid of that, it just has never been
   necessary.

Now, other people may draw the line about when a format lands in an
official release, but I think (3) is a great time to do so. It can get
slightly wider adoption, without us committing to supporting that exact
disk format 3 years from now.

John
=:->
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